Some of our favorite authors and New Yorkers pick their favorite books of 2005.

ANDRE ACIMAN

teaches comparative literature at the City University Graduate Center. He is the author of the memoir “Out of Egypt” and of “False Papers.” His new novel will be published in 2007.

“A Woman in Berlin” by Anonymous comes on the heels of the American publication of both Victor Klemperer’s wartime “Diaries” (2003), which record the survival of a Jew in Nazi Germany, and of W.G. Sebald’s harrowing description of the Allied bombings of Germany in “On the Natural History of Destruction” (2003). Both accounts give highly graphic and detailed images of the thoroughly wretched conditions of civilian life in Germany during the collapse of Hitler’s Reich. “A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City – a Diary,” published soon after the war but later withdrawn to protect the author’s identity, is now available from Metropolitan Books. It is a starkly frank and unflinching portrait of human misery during the Russian occupation of Berlin. It is also a testament to the one thing we’d be tempted to call the survival instinct if we didn’t have a far better name for it: courage, courage in the face of chaos and indignity, of plunder and looting, of all that is ugliest and most evil in man: murder and rape. Anonymous is repeatedly raped by marauding Soviet soldiers. Her story is very much in-your-face – unabashed, savage, but always lucid, clear-eyed, and dignified, with occasional flares of irony, all of which forces us to make a parallel we may be reluctant to consider: that her chilled, dispassionate chronicle of human suffering echoes two writers we wouldn’t dream of invoking to speak of German suffering during World War II: Anne Frank and Primo Levi.

LEON BOTSTEIN

is president of Bard College, music director of the American Symphony Orchestra and Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, and editor of Musical Quarterly.

The year 2005 gave us the most ambitious and provocative interpretive survey of the history of Western music, the six-volume magnum opus by Richard Taruskin, “The Oxford History of Western Music” (Oxford University Press), an achievement to be dipped into, not read from cover to cover, if only to incite intelligent controversy. 2005 was also the 100th anniversary of the miracle year of Albert Einstein’s path breaking discoveries. A fine, slender introduction to Einstein’s mind and science for the lay reader is John Rigden’s “Einstein 1905: The Standard of Greatness” (Harvard University Press). For those who love painting, the sleeper I would recommend is Barbara Haskell’s “Oscar Bluemner: A Passion for Color” (Abrams), which accompanies the landmark show still on at the Whitney. And like everyone else, my favorite novel was Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” (Vintage, paperback).

THOMAS FLEMING

is the author of “Mysteries of My Father: An Irish-American Memoir” (John Wiley & Sons).

“Hour of the Cat” (Overlook) by Peter Quinn – a gripping historical suspense story set in New York City and Berlin in 1938.”Nathanael Greene” (Henry Holt) by Terry Golway – the first good biography in decades. “Iron Tears” (Simon & Schuster) by Stanley Weintraub – a riveting look at the British home front during the American Revolution. “America on the Brink” (St. Martin’s) by Richard Buel – a book about the politics of the War of 1812 that gives new meaning to the term “anti-war movement.” “The Rise of Radio” (Princeton University Press) by Alfred Balk – a book that has Mike Wallace (among many others) burbling praise. “Comcasted” (Camino Books) by Joseph Di Stefano – a cool, penetrating look by an ace Philadelphia reporter at a company that specializes in how to remove money from your wallet. “Grant and Sherman: The Friendship That Won the Civil War” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by Charles Bracelen Flood – a first-of-its-kind study that gives readers a new angle of vision on the American Iliad. “San Francisco Is Burning: The Untold Story of the 1906 Earthquake and Fires”(Penguin) by Dennis Smith – a truly epic, definitive account of the great urban catastrophe. “The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin”(Penguin, paperback) by Gordon Wood – must-reading for devotees of Ben.

GARY GIDDINS

is the author, most recently, of “Weatherbird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century,” now available from Oxford University Press.

Henry Roth’s underappreciated second act received a diluted but still potent shot in the arm this year from Steven Kellman’s brisk, self-conscious biography, “Redemption”(W.W. Norton). The twice-told public aspect of the story qualifies as a modern literary fable, though the moral hangs in the balance. Roth, at 28, in 1934 (an interesting literary year, ranging from “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” to “Tropic of Cancer”) published his novel, “Call It Sleep,” reaping comparison with Joyce, but no remuneration and a 30-year ride into obscurity. He published a few unnoticed stories and essays, but mostly worked as a waterfowl farmer, teacher, and hospital attendant. In 1964, Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler spearheaded the rediscovery of “Call It Sleep”- a coronation that took hold for good.

In 1987 the Jewish Publication Society produced an anthology of Roth’s miscellaneous writings, “Shifting Landscape,” but the big story followed seven years later, when St. Martin’s Press began publication of a confessional four-part novel so vivid in its anecdotal specificity and masochistic rage that it redefines the line between fiction and memoir. The first volume picks up where “Call It Sleep” left off but with a new protagonist, Ira Stigman, whose debilitating stigma becomes clear only in the superior second volume, “A Diving Rock on the Hudson, “with the sudden appearance of his sister and incestuous partner, Minnie. As Mr. Kellman points out, the first volume (“A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park”) had been greeted primarily as a comeback saga, leaving the more powerful follow-ups (including “From Bondage” and the sinewy “Requiem for Harlem”) to respectful ho-hums.

Mr. Kellman shows that six volumes were planned and that 2,000 pages are archived, awaiting an editor and publisher. He also credits a firm editor, Robert Weil, in helping to shape and configure the published volumes. This is important stuff, but doesn’t go nearly far enough in explicating what was changed and what remains. Nor does he convincingly make the case that a writer capable of Roth’s cruelty, indifference, and highhandedness (principal victims were his sister, cousin, sons, and a collaborator) achieved redemption by succumbing to Juvenal’s cacoethes scribendi, described by Mr. Kellman as “an insatiable urge to fill his computer screen with more and more words” – and the “last infirmity of a restless mind.” Mr. Kellman reports that Philip Roth contemplated using the unrelated Henry as subject for a novel. Perhaps only a novelist of Roth the Younger’s mettle could do justice to an artist beset by a mania for so much relentless, Old Testament truth-telling.

DANIEL JOHNSON

writes the London Letter column each Thursday in The New York Sun.

“Mao: The Unknown Story” by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (Alfred A. Knopf) was, if not exactly the most edifying book I read in 2005, probably the most important. It shows in unprecedented and excruciating detail how Mao’s megalomania destroyed a great civilization, while murdering more people than Stalin and Hitler put together.

Among the most memorable events of the year were the death of Pope John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI, which produced a large crop of books. The best of them is “God’s Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church”(HarperCollins) by George Weigel. As the NBC News expert on the Vatican, Mr. Weigel had a ringside seat, but unlike other commentators he can see the big picture. Finally, a classic account of the rise and fall of a secular religion that has wrought more havoc in the world than any of the older faiths: Leszek Kolakowski’s “Main Currents of Marxism.” It’s reissued byW.W. Norton in one chunky volume of nearly 1,300 pages, including a new preface and epilogue – a bargain at $49.95.

KENT JONES

is editor at large of Film Comment.

Like many people, I was mesmerized by Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” (Alfred A. Knopf) – it’s impossible to imagine any other writer charting his or her emotional response to the death of a close companion with such care: care for herself, and care for the reader. Ms. Didion has to be one of the most morally illuminating artists alive, and – dare I say – one of the most instructive. I was riveted by Richard Schickel’s critical biography of Elia Kazan, “Elia Kazan: A Biography” (HarperCollins), which painstakingly lays out every contradiction in the life and work of this titanic figure. And in the retrospective department, I finally got to Edmund Wilson’s “To the Finland Station” (New York Review Books),a pungent, brilliantly elucidated, truly ecstatic vision of history.

ROGER KIMBALL

is publisher of Encounter Books and editor of the New Criterion.

You can’t read five pages of Theodore Dalrymple’s “Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses”(Ivan R. Dee) without noticing the enormous discrepancy between its somber, indeed depressing subject matter and its crisp, invigorating style. Mr. Dalrymple, the pen name of the British writer Anthony Daniels, dilates on evil, the fragility of civilization (“one of the great lessons of the twentieth century”), and the ominous frivolity of an elite culture for which “transgression” and taboo-breaking are the high est terms of praise. But he does so with such tonic intelligence and moral amplitude that you put down his book feeling braced as well as a little frightened.

From his longtime post as a prison psychiatrist in the British Midlands, Mr. Dalrymple supped widely at the huge smorgasbord of human pathology. Murderers, pedophiles, arsonists, extortionists, and bank robbers are all in a day’s work.

But “Our Culture, What’s Left of It” is more than a catalog of horrors. Its 26 essays range widely over art, literature, criminology, and social observation. He is severe on overrated sages like D.H. Lawrence, informative and generous about neglected figures like the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, and brilliantly admiring about Shakespeare, “a realist without cynicism and an idealist without utopianism.”

These bracing essays horrify, irritate, enlighten, amuse. They also stir you to remember, as Dalrymple puts it, what we have to lose.

ARTO LINDSAY

is a musician who lives in New York and Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.

“Campo Santo”(Random House) was published in English four years after W.G. Sebald was killed in a traffic accident, just as his recognition was cresting around the world. Four of the essays in this posthumous collection deal with Corsica, where Sebald was fond of hiking. I reread one of them, “The Alps in the Sea,” before writing this note. Sebald begins by describing the ancient forests of Corsica, their exceedingly tall trees rising up from dramatic ravines. These comments are restrained and sprinkled with quotations from earlier travel writers, charming us with the names of luxurious-sounding animals and noting that, as on some other islands, most of the fauna were undersize. From there he moves to a discussion of a frenzied and seemingly pointless hunting season where there are no animals left to hunt. Then he shares a shudder of disgust over Flaubert’s rendering of the legend of St. Julian, who slaughtered thousands of animals before finding redemption lying in the arms of a leper. And he ends the essay with a sunset. One need not have read all his other books to be moved.

I also want to recommend “Speaking to the Rose” (University of Nebraska Press) by Robert Walser and “Reena Spaulings” (Semiotexte) by Bernadette Corporation. The Walser selection, by his translator Christopher Middleton, includes writings from his later life in and out of mental institutions.These writings were written in a script so small they were originally thought to be in code.”Reena Spaulings”is a novel whose authorship is as mystifying, terrifying, and charming as its subject.

ALEXANDER MCALL SMITH

is the author, most recently, of “The Sunday Philosophy Club” (Pantheon).

Vikram Seth, who delighted the world with “A Suitable Boy,” has produced another masterpiece in “Two Lives” (HarperCollins). This is a family memoir which tells the story of two people, one Hindu and one Jewish, and the lives they led against a great slice of 20th-century history. The writing is, as ever with this author, beautifully clear and humane in its tone. A book to cherish; a gravely beautiful book. And then there was the pleasure of seeing, in one great volume, the complete poetry of the New York poet Kenneth Koch, “The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch” (Alfred A. Knopf).This is a lovely collection, to be dipped into and savored, and it includes that wonderful poem “One train may hide another,” which even of itself would make the purchase of this book worthwhile.

J.D. MCLATCHY

is editor of the Yale Review.

Stacy Schiff’s “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America” (Henry Holt) tells the familiar, almost mythic story of the 84-year-old Franklin’s conquest of the Parisian salons and policy. Ms. Schiff writes with a cosmopolite’s wit and aplomb. Her account mixes fresh research, satire’s cold eye, and an expert excursion into a world as strange to us as it was to old Ben.

But for narrative history at its best, David Mc-Cullough’s “1776”(Simon & Schuster) is unrivaled this year. Mr. McCullough’s mastery of the telling detail and of dramatic eloquence gives his book about George Washington’s trial by fire and the nation’s shaky beginnings an unparalleled sweep and drive. The death this year of Shelby Foote reminds us of how few writers we have among us who can pose this country’s story as a vast and moving panorama of lives caught up in and sometimes controlling circumstance. Mr. Mc-Cullough is now the very best we have.

I especially enjoyed novels this year by Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, and E.L. Doctorow, but the standout was Michael Cunningham’s “Specimen Days”(Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a trio of interlocked novellas anchored by the recurring figure of Walt Whitman. Mr. Cunningham’s methods range from historical pastiche to science fiction, and in each his canny eye, bravura style, and pulsing sympathies result in stories of genuine suspense and pathos.

W.S. Merwin, at the age of 78, this past year published three books: one of selected poems, “Migration”(Copper Canyon Press) that surveys a half-century’s worth of innovative and haunting poems; a memoir of his initiation, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, into the exotic worlds of learning and travel – a small gem of a book called “Summer Doorways”(W.W. Norton); and finally, a new collection of poems, “Present Company” (Copper Canyon Press) a series of invocations (“To Prose,” say, or “To the Air”) as evocative and surprising as anything he has written over a long and luminous career.

PETER PLAGENS

is an artist and critic. An exhibition of his paintings is on view until January 3 at Nancy Hoffman Gallery.

“Black Hole” by Charles Burns (Pantheon).Yes, it’s a “graphic novel” (read: glorified comic strip at grand opera length), and the story embraces several such au courant cliches as teenage angst, nostalgia for the 1970s, and “X-Files”-type menace and gore. But, to quote my own cliche, Charles Burns could illustrate the phone book and I’d fight crowds to get a copy. The best draftsman out there.

“Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes,” edited by Grant Romer and Brian Wallis (International Center of Photography, George Eastman House). The irresistible fascination of antique photography, the haunting quality of the faces of people long since dead, the mysterious aura of daguerreotypes, and first-rate production values in a door-stopper of a catalog. This and Mr. Burns’s graphic novel entirely satisfied my art book appetite for 2005.

DIANE RAVITCH

is research professor of education at New York University.

The most important new book of 2005 is “Mao: The Unknown Story” (Alfred A. Knopf) by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Not only is it a highly readable and exhaustively researched biography, it is a necessary antidote to widespread efforts in the scholarly world to airbrush Mao’s brutality and rehabilitate his reputation.

As Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday demonstrate, Mao was a ruthless tyrant who was personally responsible for 70 million deaths. When he used the famous line “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” he was not welcoming dissent, but luring intellectuals and educated Chinese to express criticism to ensnare and punish them.

Three years ago, I reviewed a dozen world history textbooks for high schools and discovered that they portrayed Mao in a near heroic light. Some refused to call him a dictator; all referred to his leadership in building hospitals, roads, and schools. Based on the extensive documentation in Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday’s book, it is time to place Mao in the company of Hitler and Stalin, where he belongs.

FRED SIEGEL

is the author of “The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life” (Encounter).

In “William Pitt the Younger” (Alfred A. Knopf), former Tory leader William Hague uses his own experience in politics to provide avivid account of Pitt, one of the architects of the modern world. Hague shows how the young Pitt, after becoming prime minister at 24, was able to dismiss his Whig rivals as “shamateurs” on the way to dominating English politics for two decades. It was Pitt who led England through the storms created first by the madness of George III and then the megalomania of Napoleon’s schemes to conquer England.

Pierre-Andre Taguieff’s “Rising From the Muck: The New Anti-Semitism in Europe” (Ivan R. Dee) was written before the recent French riots. But unlike the anodyne accounts of mistreated youth, Mr. Taguieff’s book penetrates beneath the surface of official rhetoric to describe the twisted connections between French third-worldism and the alienation of France’s Muslim population.

“Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies Against America”(Palgrave MacMillan) by Walid Phares is longer than it needed to be. But its value lies in his lucid exposition of how jihadism filled the vacuum created by the collapse of the caliphate after World War I. Finally, Joel Kotkin’s “The City” (W.W. Norton), a brief account of the rise and decline of cities, is an essential backdrop for understanding the current debates over sprawl.

RON ROSENBAUM

is the author of “Explaining Hitler” (HarperCollins) and a columnist for the New York Observer.

I would like to put in a word for the work of Berel Lang, the philosopher now based at Trinity College, Connecticut, author this year of a collection of essays called “Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History” (Indiana University Press). Cynthia Ozick has called Mr. Lang’s “intellectual and technical force” as a philosopher the equal of Primo Levi, and his thinking deserves to be better known outside the realm of specialists.

Mr. Lang’s work resists the temptation to mystify the difficult questions raised by the Holocaust, especially those regarding the nature of evil and the response of theodicy. In “Post-Holocaust” and earlier works such as “Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide” and “Holocaust Representation,” he demonstrates that it is possible to worry at these questions productively, carefully, often one difficult fragment at a time, and sometimes in ways that are strikingly audacious. The ethics and aesthetics of Holocaust representation, the notion of “degrees of evil,” the complexities of “comparative evil,” the putative “history of evil” – Mr. Lang rarely offers grand, sweeping answers, but rather makes us aware of the consequences of the underexamined assumptions, the questions beneath the questions.

JOHN ZORN

is a New York musician.

The books listed here are not my concept of the best books of the year because I simply do not think in those terms. What you have here is a chronological list of 10 books that I acquired in 2005, read, thoroughly enjoyed, added to my library, and now recommend on to you.

New books: “The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult,” Clement Cheroux & Andreas Fischer (Yale University Press); “Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays,” Winsor McCay (Sunday Press); “Cinema: The Archaeology of Film and the Memory of a Century,”Jean-Luc Godard and Youssef Ishaghpour (Berg); “H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life” Michel Houellebecq (McSweeney’s); “Selections: Paul Celan,” Pierre Joris, editor (University of California); “Annus Mirabilis: 1905, Albert Einstein and the Theory of Relativity,”John and Mary Gribbin (Penguin).

Older books: “Leonardo da Vinci: Flights of the Mind,” Charles Nicholl (Penguin); “L’enfer dit-on,” Bernard Noelmaruograph; “EX 1” and “EX 2,” Maruo Suehiro; “Oulipo Compendium,” Harry Matthews, editor (Atlas).